Last August, during the second-hottest year on record, while the fires in the Amazon rainforest were raging, the ice sheet in Greenland was melting, and Greta Thunberg was being greeted by adoring crowds across the U.S., something else happened that was of great relevance to the climate movement: An attorney who has been battling Chevron for more than a decade over environmental devastation in South America was put on house arrest.

Few news outlets covered the detention of Steven Donziger, who won a multibillion-dollar judgment in Ecuador against Chevron over the massive contamination in the Lago Agrio region and has been fighting on behalf of Indigenous people and farmers there for more than 25 years. So on August 6, Donziger left a Lower Manhattan courthouse unnoticed and boarded the 1 train home with an electronic monitoring device newly affixed to his ankle. Save for the occasional meeting with his lawyer or other court-sanctioned appointment, he has remained there ever since.

“I’m like a corporate political prisoner,” Donziger told me as we sat in his living room recently. The attorney, who is 6-foot-3, graying, and often used to be mistaken for New York Mayor Bill Blasio when he was able to walk the city streets, was surprisingly stoic and resigned about his predicament during my two visits to the apartment he shares with his wife and 13-year-old son. But on this particular Wednesday, as the winter sunlight in his living room was dimming and the charger for his spare ankle bracelet battery flashed on a nearby shelf, his optimism about his epic battle against one of the biggest oil companies in the world seemed to be flagging. “They are trying to totally destroy me.”

Donziger is not exaggerating. As he was arguing the case against Chevron in Ecuador back in 2009, the company expressly said its long-term strategy was to demonize him. And since then, Chevron has continued its all-out assault on Donziger in what’s become one of the most bitter and drawn-out cases in the history of environmental law. Chevron has hired private investigators to track Donziger, created a publication to smear him, and put together a legal team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms, who have successfully pursued an extraordinary campaign against him. As a result, Donziger has been disbarred and his bank accounts have been frozen. He now has a lien on his apartment, faces exorbitant fines, and has been prohibited from earning money. As of August, a court has seized his passport and put him on house arrest. Chevron, which has a market capitalization of $228 billion, has the funds to continue targeting Donziger for as long as it chooses.

In an emailed statement, Chevron wrote that “any jurisdiction that observes the rule of law should find the fraudulent Ecuadorian judgment to be illegitimate and unenforceable.” The statement also said that “Chevron will continue to work to hold the perpetrators of this fraud accountable for their actions, including Steven Donziger, who has committed a litany of corrupt and illegal acts related to his Ecuadorian judicial fraud against Chevron.”

RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP via Getty Images

Employees of state-owned Petroecuador working to cleanup a 30-year-old Chevron oil spill on February 20, 2011.

The developments that led to Donziger’s confinement were, like much of the epic legal battle he’s been engaged in for decades, highly unusual. The home confinement is his punishment for refusing a request to hand over his cellphone and computer, something that’s been asked of few other attorneys. To Donziger, who had already endured 19 days of depositions and given Chevron large portions of his case file, the request was beyond the pale, and he appealed it on the grounds that it would require him to violate his commitments to his clients. Still, Donziger said he’d turn over the devices if he lost the appeal. But even though the underlying case was civil, the federal court judge who has presided over the litigation between Chevron and Donziger since 2011, Lewis A. Kaplan, drafted criminal contempt charges against him.

In another legal peculiarity, in July, Kaplan appointed a private law firm to prosecute Donziger, after the Southern District of New York declined to do so — a move that is virtually unprecedented. And, as Donziger’s lawyer has pointed out, the firm Kaplan chose, Seward & Kissel, likely has ties to Chevron.

Making the case even more extraordinary, Kaplan bypassed the standard random assignment process and handpicked someone he knew well, U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, to oversee the case being prosecuted by the firm he chose. It was Preska who sentenced Donziger to home detention and ordered the seizure of his passport, even though Donziger had appeared in court on hundreds of previous occasions.

The post How the Environmental Lawyer Who Won a Massive Judgment Against Chevron Lost Everything appeared first on Type Investigations.

Defenders of the chemicals known as PFAS have seized upon an industry-funded study of cancer patients as evidence that the compounds used to make Teflon, firefighting foam, and many other products aren’t as dangerous as they seem.

The study, which was funded by the Minnesota-based global conglomerate 3M and published in February 2018 in the journal Toxicological Sciences, exposed 49 terminal cancer patients to high doses of PFOA. Now recognized as a widespread water contaminant, PFOA was originally developed by 3M.

The authors of the study, who include a 3M staff scientist and two University of Minnesota faculty members who received research grants from the company, initially describe its purpose as assessing the chemotherapeutic potential of PFOA. Yet the paper contains little mention of how the chemical affected patients’ cancers and instead focuses on their cholesterol levels, which appeared to decrease slightly over a six-week trial period. (Since the study’s publication, one of its authors, Matteo Convertino, left the institution.)

The authors suggest that their finding upends the observation made in many other studies that environmental exposure to PFOA increases cholesterol levels and may motivate “re-examination of the implications of population studies exposed to much lower levels of PFOA,” as they write in the abstract.

Indeed, the clinical trial is at odds with the extensive scientific literature on the chemicals based on populations of people who had been exposed to PFAS for years. That research shows that very low levels of the chemicals, which accumulate in the body over time, cause elevated cholesterol levels and interfere with developmental, hormonal, reproductive, and immune function. Among the health problems associated with the chemicals are reduced penis size, thyroid disease, and cancers.

Although PFOA does not appear to have helped combat the cancers in any way and, according to a note in the text, left some patients unable to complete the regimen due to fatigue, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, the industry has promoted the research as a win. “Good News on PFOA” was the heading of a 2010 email about early results from the clinical trial that Mike Neal, a member of the trade organization PlasticsEurope, sent to his colleagues. The email forwarded results from the study sent to him by a DuPont scientist.

Lawyers for DuPont tried to introduce early results from the research as evidence in a 2015 trial filed on behalf of a woman who developed kidney cancer after drinking PFOA-contaminated water. The judge disallowed the attorneys from mentioning the study, and the company was ultimately found liable in the case.

As pressure mounts for states and the federal government to set regulatory levels for PFAS, industry groups that face liability over water contamination have turned back to the small study as evidence that the scientific approaches previously used to calculate safe exposures levels “are not predictive of humans and result in unreasonably conservative values,” as the American Petroleum Institute wrote in comments it submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency on June 10. (Among the many industrial uses of PFAS are oil and gas extraction and mining.)

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Forest & Paper Association, and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers also embraced the 3M paper’s findings. In a June letter to the EPA commenting on the agency’s proposed recommendations for addressing PFAS contamination, the groups referred to the study as “very important for predicting appropriate risk-based drinking water values.” A letter from the American Chemistry Council about the same proposed regulations also cited the research.

While industry representatives have also called on state regulators to consider the study as they weigh safety levels for PFAS, some have rejected the suggestion. New Jersey’s Drinking Water Quality Institute responded with skepticism to a 2014 request from the Chemistry Council of New Jersey to consider the then-unpublished research on the cancer patients, which was submitted to the agency as an abstract. While the industry group argued that the experiment showed that patients’ liver and kidney function wasn’t affected by PFOA, state regulators pointed out that the abstract referred to a patient who “experienced drug related toxicity (DLT) consisting of ‘grade 5 renal failure.’” It is unclear why that patient isn’t mentioned in the published paper.

In an email with some grammatical errors and a misspelling, Matteo Convertino, the study’s first author, wrote that a company, CXR Biosciences, conducted the original research on the cancer patients and that he and his co-authors used their data to produce the paper. “As far as we know, the study was conducted under Ethics Committed review at all the clinic sites and subjects gave written informed consent,” he wrote. “3M, that funded our study, was only interested in the assessment of PFOA effects on recorded physiological indicators.” Asked what basis they had for believing that PFOA might be of chemotherapeutic value, Convertino wrote on behalf of himself and one of his co-authors, Timothy Church, “Neither of us is expert in chemotherapy and cannot vouch for the rationale CXR gave for the anti-neoplastic potential of PFOA.”

The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services cast doubt on the study, noting in a June document responding to public comments on the state’s proposed safety standard for PFAS that “NHDES has serious reservations about relying on the results of such a study with a small sample size, restrictive inclusion criteria for participants, and the use of late-stage cancer patients whose metabolic function is not likely comparable to the general population.”

A medical ethicist also expressed serious reservations about the study. “The paper raises lots of ethical questions,” said Robert Klitzman, a professor and academic director of the master’s program in bioethics at Columbia University. Klitzman noted that the authors did not present their cholesterol findings in “clinically meaningful terms” and raised questions about what the terminally ill patients were told when asked to participate in the study.

Alan Ducatman, a physician who has extensive experience researching the health effects of PFOA, pointed out that neither the dose used in the study nor its duration reflect typical environmental exposures to the chemical. Ducatman also took issue with the study’s size. “These guys are saying their 49 dying cancer patients are better than the hundreds of thousands of people that have already been studied,” he said. “It makes no sense.”

Nevertheless, Ducatman can expect to hear more about the experiment in the coming days. He is among 400 people attending a national meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry focusing on PFAS this week. The toxicologist Michael Dourson, who helped plan the meeting, is publishing a paper that uses the cancer patient research to question human sensitivity to PFOA and will display this work at the meeting, according to an email he sent to colleagues. Sponsors of the meeting include 3M; the global industry trade group FluoroCouncil, representing companies that make PFAS; and the environmental research programs of the Department of Defense — all entities that have huge financial stakes in the regulation of PFAS.

This isn’t the first time that Dourson has weighed in on how to calculate safety levels for PFOA. In 2000, the toxicologist was recommended by DuPont executives to help West Virginia set a regulatory level for the chemical. Dourson’s consulting company, Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, had “a very good reputation among the folks that are still in the business of blessing criteria,” one executive explained, going on to praise TERA’s ability to “assemble a package and then sell this to EPA, or whomever we desired.” Dourson’s company got the job and, in 2002, helped West Virginia set a regulatory level that was 150 times higher than an internal safety level set by DuPont. (Dourson, whom Trump nominated in 2017 to run the EPA’s chemicals program, was not confirmed for that job in part because of concerns about his record on PFAS.)

Nor is the cancer patient study the first to raise the idea that PFOA, a known cause of disease and environmental contamination, might provide health benefits. Industry consultants known as the Weinberg Group sent a now-notorious memo to DuPont in 2003 recommending that the company “reshape the debate by identifying the likely known health benefits of PFOA exposure.” (DuPont has denied that it hired the consulting firm. But, as The Intercept reported in 2015, the Weinberg Group invoiced DuPont for work several months after the memo was sent.)

The Weinberg Group laid out a strategy for halting mounting investigations into the dangers of PFOA, “which discourages governmental agencies, the plaintiff’s bar, and misguided environmental groups from pursuing this matter any further.” Among the group’s suggestions was “constructing a study to establish not only that PFOA is safe over a range of serum concentration levels, but that it offers real health benefits.”

The post Industry Cites 3M Experiment That Exposed Cancer Patients to PFAS to Claim the Chemicals Aren’t So Bad. appeared first on Type Investigations.

The students at Westmeade Elementary School worked hard on their dragon. And it paid off. The plastic bag receptacle that the kids painted green and outfitted with triangular white teeth and a “feed me” sign won the students from the Nashville suburb first place in a recycling box decorating contest. The idea, as Westmeade’s proud principal told a local TV news show, was to help the environment. But the real story behind the dragon — as with much of the escalating war over plastic waste — is more complicated.

The contest was sponsored by A Bag’s Life, a recycling promotion and education effort of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, a lobbying group that fights restrictions on plastic. That organization is part of the Plastics Industry Association, a trade group that includes Shell Polymers, LyondellBasell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron Phillips, DowDuPont, and Novolex — all of which profit hugely from the continued production of plastics. And even as A Bag’s Life was encouraging kids to spread the uplifting message of cleaning up plastic waste, its parent organization, the Progressive Bag Alliance, was backing a state bill that would strip Tennesseans of their ability to address the plastics crisis. The legislation would make it illegal for local governments to ban or restrict bags and other single-use plastic products — one of the few things shown to actually reduce plastic waste.

A week after Westmeade’s dragon won the contest, the APBA got its own reward: The plastic preemption bill passed the Tennessee state legislature. Weeks later, the governor signed it into law, throwing a wrench into an effort underway in Memphis to charge a fee for plastic bags. Meanwhile, A Bag’s Life gave the Westmeade kids who worked on the bag monster a $100 gift card to use “as they please.” And with that, a minuscule fraction of its vast wealth, the plastics industry applied a green veneer to its increasingly bitter and desperate fight to keep profiting from a product that is polluting the world.

A Bag’s Life is just one small part of a massive, industry-led effort now underway to suppress meaningful efforts to reduce plastic waste while keeping the idea of recycling alive. The reality of plastics recycling? It’s pretty much already dead. In 2015, the U.S. recycled about 9 percent of its plastic waste, and since then the number has dropped even lower. The vast majority of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic ever produced — 79 percent— has ended up in landfills or scattered all around the world. And as for those plastic shopping bags the kids were hoping to contain: Less than 1 percent of the tens of billions of plastic bags used in the U.S. each year are recycled.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to properly dispose of the array of toys, single-use clamshells, bottles, bags, takeout containers, iced coffee cups, straws, sachets, yogurt tubs, pouches, candy bar wrappers, utensils, chip bags, toiletry tubes, electronics, and lids for everything that passes through our lives daily. We have to. But we are well past the point where the heartfelt efforts of schoolchildren or anyone else on the consumer end can solve the plastics problem. It no longer matters how many hoots we give. There is already way too much plastic that won’t decompose and ultimately has nowhere to go, whether it’s mashed into a dragon container or not.

China’s National Sword

China’s decision in 2017 to stop receiving the vast majority of plastic waste from other countries blew the flimsy lid off our dysfunctional recycling system. That year, when the Chinese government announced the National Sword policy, as it’s called, the U.S. sent 931 million kilograms of plastic waste to China and Hong Kong. The U.S. has been offloading vast bundles of scrap this way since at least 1994, when the Environmental Protection Agency began tracking plastics exports. The practice has served to both mask the mounting crisis and absolve U.S. consumers of guilt. But in fact, much of the “recycled” plastic scrap that the U.S. sent to China appears to have been burned or buried instead of being refashioned into new products.

Although China’s turnabout made the failure of the plastics recycling system suddenly and undeniably obvious, in truth the plastics problem has been with us as long as plastic has. Over the decades, as production has grown exponentially, we’ve never managed to repurpose even one-tenth of our plastic waste. Since the EPA began tracking plastics recycling in 1994, when the U.S. recycled less than 5 percent, the rate went up only about 5 percent, peaking at 9.5 percent in 2014. Although there is no data before 1994, the rate was almost certainly even lower then. Some of that failure can be blamed on careless consumers, but much of the waste that is dutifully put into recycling bins and bags also gets landfilled and burned because there’s no market for it.

The plastics problem has been growing exponentially for decades. In 1967, when Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate” was being advised to go into plastics, less than 25 million tons were produced each year. Even back then, the companies that made the plastic were already aware of the growing waste problem. Yet by 1980, production had doubled. Ten years later, it doubled again to 100 million tons, surpassing the amount of steel produced globally. Today, the plastics industry, estimated to be worth more than $4 trillion, generates more than 300 million tons of plastic a year according to the most recent records — nearly half of which is for single-use items, meaning that it will almost instantly become trash.

With the institution of China’s new policy in January 2018, the extent of the plastic waste crisis became dramatically more visible. Around the world, bales of used plastic that just a year earlier would have been destined for China began piling up. In the U.S., some cities have stopped their plastics recycling programs altogether.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Workers sort recycling material at the Waste Management Material Recovery Facility in Elkridge, Maryland, June 28, 2018.

Without good alternatives, the U.S. is now burning six times the amount of plastic it’s recycling — even though the incineration process releases cancer-causing pollutants into the air and creates toxic ash, which also needs to be disposed of somewhere. And poor people are stuck with the worst consequences of the plastics crisis. Eight out of 10 incinerators in the U.S. are in communities that are either poorer or have fewer white people than the rest of the country, and residents living near them are exposed to the toxic air pollution their combustion produces.

Globally, too, the problem is being dumped on the less fortunate and less powerful. Because the U.S. can no longer ship its plastic waste to China, much of that waste is going to Turkey, Senegal, and other countries that are ill-equipped to deal with it. In May, the most recent month for which data is available, the U.S. sent 64.9 million kilograms of plastic scrap to 58 countries. Thailand, India, and Indonesia — where more than 80 percent of waste is mismanaged, according to data published in Science — are among the countries that now find themselves besieged with U.S. plastic that’s being illegally dumped and burned.

All the Plastics in the Seas

The terrifying news about plastic seems to be as inescapable as the plastic itself, tiny bits of which are now almost everywhere. One study found these “microplastics” in the Pyrenees mountain air 100 miles from the nearest city. Another found that microplastics are being turned into sewage sludge and spread on fields that grow food. And, as we know from the plastic-filled whales that regularly wash up dead, the oceans are awash in plastic waste and now contain some 150 million tons of the stuff — a mass expected soon to surpass the weight of all the fish in the seas.

We humans also have plastic lodged in our bodies. The substance often sold to us as protection from contamination is in both food and water. Bottled water, sales of which are increasing in part because people are seeking alternatives to contaminated local water supplies, now containsplastic as well. A 2018 study found that 93 percent of bottled water samples contained microplastics. While all the big brands tested positive for microplastics, the worst was Nestlé Pure Life, which claims that its water “goes through a 12-step quality process, so you can trust every drop.”

It’s worth noting that in both 2017 and 2018, Nestlé ranked in the top three among brands whose plastic trash was most often collected in global cleanup efforts conducted by the environmental group Break Free From Plastic.

The confluence of terrible news has taken public outrage over plastic to a new level. Once regarded mostly as an eyesore or a nuisance, plastic waste is now widely understood to be a cause of species extinction, ecological devastation, and human health problems. And because more than 99 percent of plastic is derived from oil, natural gas, and coal — and because its destruction also uses fossil fuels — environmental groups now recognize plastic as a major contributor to climate change. Naturalist David Attenborough has likened the shift in public opinion over plastics to the process through which the public reached a consensus on the harms of slavery.

Between extraction, refining, and waste management, the production and incineration of plastics will add more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere this year alone — an amount equal to the emissions from 189 500-megawatt coal power plants, according to a report from the Center for International Environmental Law.

Recycled plastics — once seen as a sign of environmental virtue — is increasingly recognized as posing threats to our health. Plastics contain additives that determine its properties, including stability, color, and flexibility. Most of the thousands of these chemicals aren’t regulated, but it’s clear that some of those additives, which end up in recycled plastics, are dangerous. One study found that half of recycled plastics in India contained a flame retardant associated with neurological, reproductive, and developmental harms.

Black plastic, used in everything from children’s toys to kitchen utensils, food packaging, cellphone cases, and thermoses, appears to be particularly dangerous. The plastic is often sourced from recycled electronics that contain phthalates, flame retardants, and heavy metals, such as cadmium, lead, and mercury. Even at very low levels, these chemicals can cause serious reproductive and developmental problems.

But most of the additives aren’t tracked or well studied. “The industry has no idea what they’re putting in the plastic and who’s putting it in,” said Andrew Turner, a British chemist who recently found toxic chemicals in 40 percent of the black plastic toys, thermoses, cocktail stirrers, and utensils he tested. In some plastic, he found the chemicals present at 30 times safety standards set by governments.

Even chemicals that are regulated often have limits set for electronics but not for recycled products. “You’ve got something that wouldn’t be compliant with the regulations as an electric item because its levels are too high, but because it’s turned into a fork, there’s nothing to stop it from being used,” Turner said. Antimony, which Turner found in food containers, toys, and office supplies, “is restricted in drinking water, but not in electrical waste.” Turner and Zhanyun Wang, another scientist I spoke with who studies chemical additives to plastics, told me that they no longer use black plastic utensils. “Given the option, I’d prefer something white or clear,” said Turner, adding that he tries to avoid utensils made of any kind of plastic.

The solution to this global mess clearly has to be much bigger than personal cutlery choices. Among the organizations demanding that we push past the idea of recycling and require corporations to limit plastics production are Greenpeace, the Surfrider Foundation, As You Sow, the Rainforest Alliance and 5Gyres, an organization started by a couple who sailed across the Pacific Ocean on a raft made out of discarded bottles. Fueled by a spike in consumer frustration with products that make them complicit in the problem, plastic-free restaurants and grocery stores are now emerging.

Taxes, bans, and fees on plastic products have been catching on around the world. In March, the European Union voted to ban single-use plastics by 2021. In June, Canada followed suit, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowing to not just ban single-use plastics such as bags, straws, and cutlery, but also to hold plastics manufacturers responsible for their waste. One hundred and forty-one countries, including China, Bangladesh, India, and 34 African countries, have implemented taxes or partial bans on plastics.

In the U.S., the Trump administration has worked against international efforts to crack down on plastic waste, so cities and towns are leading the way. While only eight states have enacted plastic restrictions, more than 330 local plastic bag ordinances have passed in 24 states. Some federal lawmakers have also recognized that federal action is necessary to beat back the mounting tide of plastic. “Plastics recycling is not a realistic solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Most consumer plastics are economically impractical to recycle based on market conditions alone,” Rep. Alan Lowenthal and Sen. Tom Udall wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump in June, noting that the “spread of single-use plastic products has led to widespread pollution of plastic in the U.S. and has caused a growing financial burden on state agencies, local governments and taxpayers for remediation.”

Big Plastic Fights Back

Even the executives at a recent plastics industry conference admit how bad the crisis is — at least to one another. All we hear is “you’ve got to get rid of plastics,” Garry Kohl, of PepsiCo, said to his fellow members of the Plastics Industry Association at a conference in April. Gathered in the gilded ballroom of a Dallas hotel, the representatives of big plastics manufacturers, recyclers, raw materials providers, extruders, brand owners, and others in the plastics business grappled aloud about their role in the crisis. Especially difficult, said Kohl, who directs packaging innovation of PepsiCo’s snacks and foods, was the widely circulated picture of a dead plastic-filled albatross. “This is very emotional for our senior leaders,” Kohl said, as the now iconic picture of the albatross — really just a few feathers and a decaying beak arranged around an assortment of bottle caps, lighter parts, and plastic bits — flashed above him. “They’re all talking about the albatross.”

Dan Clark/USFWS

In this photo provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a black footed albatross chick with plastics in its stomach lies dead on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands on Nov. 2, 2014.

Patty Long, interim president and chief executive officer of the Plastics Industry Association, the group that convened the Texas meeting, also acknowledged the pain of being the public face of an industry held responsible for the devastation of the natural world. Long admitted that she squirmed her way through another social media phenomenon that, along with the albatross, has changed the course of the war over plastics: the video of the sea turtle with a plastic straw jammed in its nostril. Long isn’t the only one. Since it was posted in 2015, the eight excruciating minutes in which marine biologists yank at the plastic straw with pliers while the creature squirms and bleeds, has been viewed 36 million times.

All in all, Long admitted, it had been a tough year, in which some 376 anti-plastics bills were introduced, and the perception of the plastics industry has continued to “spiral down exponentially.” The Plastics Industry Association is taking its cratering image seriously, working to offset it with pro-plastics presentations for elementary and middle school students, a plastics ambassadors program and, so young people can “feel good about” working in the industry, Long said, a “future leaders in plastics” group.

But discomfort over the dead albatross, the bloody turtle, and industry’s public image notwithstanding, the companies that make billions from plastics have no intention of slowing down. Instead, the industry is gearing up for the fight of its life, which may explain why an expert in actual warfare gave the keynote at the plastics conference.

In 2000, U.S. Navy Cmdr. Kirk Lippold guided his crew through a terrorist attack on the USS Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed and 39 injured. Now a crisis management consultant, Lippold told the audience at the Plastics Industry Association meeting a grueling story of mass casualties, near-death experiences, and a shrapnel-filled vessel taking on water. His tale, which ended with Lippold piloting his hobbled ship back into the open seas with the national anthem blaring, suggested that with enough fierce determination, the plastics executives too might be able to sail past the threats facing them.

At stake for them is not just the current plastics market now worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, but its likely expansion. Falling oil and gas prices mean that the cost of making new plastic, already very low, will be even cheaper. The price drop has led to more than 700 plastics industry projects now in the works, including expansions of old plants and the construction of new ones by Chevron, Shell, Dow, Exxon, Formosa Plastics, Nova Chemicals, and Bayport Polymers, among other companies, according to a presentation from the regulatory affairs director of the BASF Corporation at the plastics industry conference.

The growing output of new cheap plastic further undermines the industry’s own argument that recycling can resolve the waste crisis. It’s already impossible for most recycled plastic to compete with “virgin” plastic in the marketplace. With the exception of bottles made of PET (No. 1) and HDPE (No. 2), the rest of the waste is essentially worthless. Around 30 percent of both types of plastic bottles were sold for recycling in 2017, though some of those may have wound up being landfilled or incinerated. The recent fossil fuel boom makes it even cheaper to make new plastic and thus, even more difficult to sell the recycled product. This, in turn, makes the plastics companies’ push for recycling that much more implausible — and their battle to kill efforts to limit plastics production even more desperate.

Banning Plastic Bans

Matt Seaholm, the executive director of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, seemed to relish his part in the fight. While others at the plastics industry conference tended toward hand-wringing and at least some acknowledgment of the problem of plastic waste, Seaholm was unapologetic in his antagonism of environmental groups that have been calling attention to it. In Texas, Seaholm, the former national director of the Koch brothers-led Americans for Prosperity, positioned himself as the enemy of environmentalists.

“They hate what we’re doing,” Seaholm told his plastics industry colleagues at the conference with a mischievous grin. “We wear this as a badge of honor.” The fact that environmental groups oppose the APBA’s tactics, Seaholm added, is evidence that his lobbying group “must be doing something right.”

The APBA began pushing back against plastics restrictions around the country in 2011. Around 2015, the industry group upped its game. Rather than just opposing individual bans, the APBA began lobbying for state preemption laws. The approach, which another Koch brothers-affliated group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, has used to fight local action on other issues, including pesticide restrictions and living wagelaws, prevents cities and towns from passing local plastic bans. In the past eight years, the American Chemistry Council has helped pass preemption bills based on ALEC’s model in 13 states. According to Seaholm, who joined the group in 2016, 42 percent of Americans now live in states where they can’t pass local bans on plastics.

Other plastics industry lobbying groups, including ALEC’s American City County Exchange and the National Federation of Independent Business, have also argued for preemption, or “uniformity” as they call it, on the grounds that bans hurt businesses that use plastic. While presenting bans as bad for both businesses and poor people, who they claim will be disproportionately affected, the industry has also used campaign donations to make its case. Over the past year, the Flexible Packaging Association, whose members include Dow, Exxon Mobil Chemical, SABIC, Chevron Phillips Chemical, and LyondellBasell, more than doubled its spending nationwide. The group significantly upped its contributions to Tennessee lawmakers, for instance, in the year leading up to the passage of the bag preemption bill there.

While the APBA is fighting hard to push plastics preemption, the group’s national spending is unclear because as a wholly owned entity of the Plastics Industry Association, there’s no federal requirement to make its expenditures public. But state lobbying disclosures show that it has spent millions fighting bag bans. This advocacy of plastic bans puts Plastics Industry Associations members, including PepsiCo, Walmart, and the Carlyle Group, in an uncomfortable situation. All these brands have made public sustainability pledges that appear to be at odds with the group’s fights against local laws limiting plastic.

Asked about the apparent dissonance between its sustainability pledge and participation in the Plastics Industry Association, Walmart provided an emailed statement saying that “Walmart’s aspiration is to achieve zero plastic waste. We are taking actions across our business to use less plastic, recycle more and support innovations to improve plastic waste reduction systems.” The statement also said that Walmart has “asked our suppliers to reduce unnecessary plastic packaging, increase packaging recyclability and increase recycled content, and to help us educate customers on reducing, reusing and recycling plastic.”

PepsiCo and the Carlyle Group did not respond to requests for comment.

Seaholm appeared not to care about the terrible optics of the industry’s fight against efforts to protect the environment with plastic bans, which he derided as “primarily driven by emotion.” “They’re doing it because it feels good,” Seaholm told the plastics executives in Dallas. “They get to high-five each other.”

The Plastics Industry Vs. Two Little Girls

In Isle of Palms, South Carolina, the people who spearheaded the state’s first plastic bag ban in 2015 wouldn’t disagree that their effort was driven by emotion. Suzette Head and Mila Kosmos, who live in the small coastal town near Charleston, screeched with joy when their local ordinance passed. “I felt happy that the bags would be gone,” Mila, now 9, remembered recently.

The effort began with another emotion, when the two girls were in kindergarten: sadness. Suzette was at her local aquarium when a naturalist held up a jar with a gray swirl inside and asked what the kids thought it was. Suzette thought it was a jellyfish and said so. When she learned that it was, in fact, a plastic bag and that a turtle could die if it made the same mistake and ate the bag, she became distraught.

“Suzette loves animals,” her mother, Kathy Kent, explained. On their walk home from the aquarium after the demonstration, the two began talking about how they could stop people from throwing away plastic bags. “At first I said to her, Well, you just can’t change people,” said Kent. “But then I listened to myself and thought, Oh my God, what am I saying and quickly walked it back.” Without having any idea what exactly she was promising, Kent told her daughter that the two of them would do something to keep plastic bags from ending up in the ocean. Shortly afterward, they teamed up with Mila and her mother and several other Isle of Palms residents who were also upset about plastic. They’d walk the beach in the afternoons picking up bags and brainstorming. Eventually, they hit on the idea of drafting a petition to ban bags and walked door to door to get the support of several local shop owners.

Courtesy of Kathy Kent

Suzette Head’s handwritten speech, which she delivered in front of the Isle of Palms, South Carolina, city council on May 26, 2015.

“It was a piece of cake asking businesses to support us,” said Kent. “Everyone else knows that having a litter-free, clean beach is good for everyone and every business.” A little over a year after Suzette’s upsetting trip to the aquarium, the ordinance passed the city council in its first vote. Yet almost four years later, South Carolina is now considering legislation backed by the APBA that would not just ban future bag bans, but also undo the ordinance in Isle of Palms and 17 other local laws that have since restricted plastic in South Carolina.

The Crying Indian

If the image of giant multinational corporations destroying little girls’ efforts to protect sea creatures is less than flattering, the plastics industry can take comfort in the fact that it has successfully defeated environmentalists’ attempts to hold it responsible for plastic with similar tactics before. The trick has been to publicly embrace its opponents’ concern for the environment while privately fighting attempts at regulation.

The double-edged strategy dates back to at least 1969, when an editorial in Modern Plastics magazine warned about the impending waste crisis. The big plastics makers were already aware of the problem. That year, DuPont, Chevron, Dow, and the Society for the Plastics Industry were among the groups represented at a conference on packaging waste. And when the first Earth Day was launched in 1970 in part to tackle that crisis, the industry was ready.

That week, demonstrators held an “ecology trek” in which they dumped their nonreturnable bottles at Coca-Cola’s headquarters. The activists had a solution to the mounting waste crisis: bottle bills that would put the onus for cleaning up the waste on manufacturers. Coca-Cola, which had been tipped off about the protests by the National Soft Drink Association, met the demonstrators with free soda and trash bins. The big beverage and packaging companies fought the bottle bill and came up with a clever dodge that’s still paying off today. Not only did they tar supporters of the bottle bills as radicals, but they also launched a massive PR campaign that seemed to incorporate some of the anger about the mounting garbage that had fueled the Earth Day protests while shifting responsibility for the waste away from the companies that created it and onto consumers.

In 1971, Keep America Beautiful, an anti-litter organization formed by beverage and packaging companies, including PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Phillip Morris, teamed up with the Ad Council to create the now-infamous “Crying Indian” ad. Although the “Indian” who tears up when he sees a bag of litter thrown on the ground was really an Italian-American actor with a feather stuck in his hair, the ad’s sneakier deception was that its expression of concern about pollution was brought to the airwaves by many of the same companies that produced the pollution. Even as their ad was inducing guilt in viewers for spreading trash, Keep America Beautiful’s members were fighting legislation that could have done much to address the problem.

“What makes this all the more insidious is that these TV spots and other ads were presented as public service announcements — and thus appeared to be politically neutral — but, in fact, served the industry agenda,” said historian Finis Dunaway, who lays out the story of Keep America Beautiful’s PR efforts in “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of Environmental Images.” “It was propaganda that did not appear propagandistic. It also shielded corporate polluters from blame by shifting responsibility onto individuals.”

Future Earth Days would continue to emphasize consumers’ personal responsibility for recycling, including the national commemoration of the 10th Earth Day in 1980, which was organized by Michael McCabe, a former legislative assistant who would go on serve as Joe Biden’s communications and special projects director before spearheading DuPont’s defense of a dangerous chemical used in many plastics, PFOA. In 1990, the 20th anniversary celebration was marked by a celebrity-studded TV special that emphasized the importance of individuals’ actions, including tree-planting and recycling, in protecting the environment.

To this day, Keep America Beautiful — which is still led by executives at beverage and plastics companies, including Dr Pepper, Dow, and the American Chemistry Council — continues to focus on litterbugs, prodding errant citizens to better dispose of their plastic waste while many of its members fend off regulation of their production of that waste. Several of the group’s corporate partners — including founding companies Coca-Cola and PepsiCo and their trade group, the American Beverage Association — have opposed bottle bills that have been shown to help solve the plastic waste problem.

Noah Ullman, chief marketing officer for Keep America Beautiful, disputes the idea that the organization was founded “as some kind of ruse. The intent was not there,” he said in a phone interview. Instead, Ullman wrote in an email to The Intercept, “the first objective of Keep America Beautiful was, and remains, encouraging people to ‘put it in the bin.’ Preventing litter is the basis for everything else — it helps keep communities beautiful (which has a long list of social and economic benefits) and helps protect animals and our environment from solid waste ending up in unintended places.” Ullman said that the organization does not take a position on bottle bills, but noted that while bottle bills improve the collection rates of refunded materials, the “unintended consequence is that [it] devalues the rest of the waste stream for recycling (e.g. glass, cartons, milk jugs, etc.) and those items become less likely to be recycled.”

The American Beverage Association, which has opposed bottle bills in the past, provided The Intercept with a statement, saying, “We are not opposed to any ideas that will get us to better recycling rates in the future if they do not harm the comprehensive curbside recycling systems that consumers prefer.”

In an email, a representative of Coca-Cola wrote that the American Beverage Association represents the company’s views on bottle bills. The email also said that “at Coca-Cola, our focus is on helping to collect and reuse the equivalent of 100 percent of the bottles and cans that we put into the marketplace. This includes ensuring that all of our packaging is 100% recyclable and using at least 50% recycled content in our packaging by 2030.”

With their focus on recycling and nonprofit status, Keep America Beautiful and other anti-litter organizations funded by the plastics and beverage industry, including the Recycling Partnership, offer companies both the opportunity to demonstrate concern about plastic pollution and a tax write off. The Coca-Cola Foundation gave $640,000 to the Recycling Partnership to improve recycling in 2017, for instance. The organization “works with thousands of communities all across the country to provide access to cart-based recycling and education to help residents understand how to recycle materials more and better, including paper, aluminum and steel cans, cardboard, cartons, glass and, yes, plastics,” according to an emailed statement from the organization, which also noted that only half of Americans who have access to convenient recycling do everything they could.

While working to improve recycling and create end markets for recycled plastic, the Recycling Partnership  also presents a particularly rosy view of recycling. In May, the group sent out an email that announced that “87% of People Think Recycling is Important,” while failing to mention the reality of single-digit recycling rates. The group’s other funding partners include ExxonMobil, Keurig, Dr. Pepper, Dow, the International Bottled Water Association, the American Beverage Association, and the American Chemistry Council.

In an emailed statement, the Recycling Partnership noted that only half of Americans who have access to convenient recycling do everything they could. “The Recycling Partnership works with thousands of communities all across the country to provide access to cart-based recycling and education to help residents understand how to recycle materials more and better, including paper, aluminum and steel cans, cardboard, cartons, glass and, yes, plastics.” The statement also said that the group is working to create and support end markets for recycled plastic.

But according to Jan Dell, an engineer who worked as a corporate sustainability consultant before creating The Last Beach Cleanup, an organization that confronts plastics pollution, the Recycling Partnership and other nonprofits supported by the plastics industry are using misleading information to ease concerns that otherwise might lead consumers to stop buying plastic. “They’re trying to create the perception that there’s a viable way to recycle most plastic waste into new products,” said Dell, “and that’s simply not true.”

The “Recyclable” Scam

Much of the plastic waste that is amassing in the oceans, buried in landfills, and scattered throughout nature is “recyclable,” which is to say that it could, in theory, be refashioned into new products. Companies have latched on to the hopeful term to make their latest plastic products more palatable. Starbucks, for instance, has lavished praise on itself for its “recyclable lid” rolling out in six cities this summer, which the company predicted will eliminate a billion straws. But because the lids are made from polypropylene (also known as No. 5 plastic), and there is very little market for recycled polypropylene, that number has no basis in reality. Only 5 percent of polypropylene was recycled in 2015 — and that was before China decided to stop taking our waste. Since then, the percentage recycled is likely much lower still, meaning that the vast majority of the 1 billion new “recyclable” Starbucks lids will end up where the old ones did — in landfills, trash heaps, incinerators, and the oceans.

In January, Taco Bell also crowed over its own new plastic lids, as if creating more plastic would somehow fix the plastics crisis. “Love the Earth? Yep, us too,” the company’s website announced, “which is why we’ve recently started to use recyclable cold cups and lids in all of our restaurants.”

Another company, Tempo Plastics, explicitly advertises its plastic pouches as “guilt-free.” Although they’re made from high-density polyethylene, or No. 2 plastic — only 5.5 percent of which is recycled in the U.S. — the company’s new “Harmony Pack” will feature reassuring green arrows and the imprimatur of How2Recycle.

A project of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and recycling nonprofit called GreenBlue — whose board includes executives from Dow Chemical, Mars, Target, Amazon, and the Delfort Group — How2Recycle makes some plastic products seem far easier to recycle than they are. The Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guide makes it clear that “to misrepresent, directly or by implication, that a product or package is recyclable” is deceptive. In order to make unqualified claims that a product is recyclable, recycling facilities have to be available to at least 60 percent of the consumers to whom it’s sold. But the How2Recycle symbol is now affixed to several products that will be all but impossible for many consumers to recycle, including cups, plates, and containers made from plastics Nos. 3 through 7, all of which now have recycling rates close to zero.

Asked about the “guilt-free” pouch, Kelly Cramer, director of How2Recycle at GreenBlue, wrote in an email that the product was not “appropriately qualified” for the label and said that the organization would “reach out to this company immediately to rectify.” Regarding the pictures of plastic cups and plates that are not accepted by recyclers in most parts of the country but whose packaging bore the How2Recycle label, Cramer said that the label referred to the bags that contained the cups and plates, which is recyclable if brought back to an in-store recycling program, but acknowledged that the plates and cups inside them were not recyclable.

Although How2Recycle provides “not recyclable” as well as “recyclable” labels, it is the member companies’ choice whether to apply them, she said. “That member chose not to label the product,” Cramer said. “This is an area where we’ve given the member a choice to label the product or not. If we were too strict in our requirements, we wouldn’t have as many members join the program.”

Cramer argued that another product, cups made of polypropylene, or No. 5 plastic, may or may not qualify as recyclable — a question that is now being litigated in a federal court in California. Cramer said that GreenBlue is conducting research into the recycling rates of polypropylene and defended the How2Recycle program as a way to minimize waste that is a fact of modern life.

“We don’t want people to think that recycling alleviates all their consumption guilt. But the truth of the matter is that we all consume, and packaging protects products that have to be moved to be sold,” she said. “In the future, it would be beautiful if we had robust reuse or novel delivery systems to rethink the entire product packaging system. But we’re not there yet.”

Although recycling does little to alleviate the mounting plastics crisis, the promotion of it has proven extremely useful to the industry when local bans on plastic bans have been proposed. The American Chemistry Council recently rolled out local campaigns for WRAP, or the Wrap Recycling Action Program, in several places where plastic bans have been proposed.

The public-private partnership run by the ACC, which encourages the recycling of plastic bags through 18,000 plastic film collection sites around the country and promotes the idea that plastic bags can be recycled, launched a new effort in Connecticut in 2017 that coincided with the state’s consideration of a tax on plastic bags. When Chicago was weighing a plastic bag tax in 2016, the ACC rolled out WRAP there too, announcing that locals can recycle plastic bags “at nearly 400 local grocery and retail stores.” This year, in Florida, the ACC made another local WRAP push just as a state-level bill to ban plastic straws was introduced.

The group teaches the public how to recycle plastic film — any plastic less than 10 mil thick — a process that turns out to be complicated enough to require its own educational organization. Most municipal recycling programs don’t accept shopping bags and other flexible plastic, which can snag machines. So WRAP directs consumers to bring it to local take-back centers, which collect the film and send it on to recyclers. The plastic first has to be washed and dried, according to WRAP, and even then only some of it can be recycled. The program can recycle the clear wrap you might put around food at home, as well as bags that contain most produce, groceries, and bread, but not candy-bar wrappers, six-pack rings, and the plastic bags that contain chips or frozen food.

But even as WRAP promotes the message that plastic film can and should be recycled, and scolds people who don’t put plastic bags in recycle bins, many of the used bags and other plastic waste it collects wind up being burned or sent to landfills. According to the most recent report on plastic film recycling published in July by the ACC, the amount collected in the U.S. and sold for recycling fell from 1.3 billion to 1.0 billion pounds between 2016 and 2017 — and that was before China’s restriction on plastic waste imports was fully implemented. The ACC report admitted that some of the bags wound up where they would have if they didn’t first make a brief stop in a bag-recycling bin. “Due to a lack of buyers — for the quality and amount of material available — towards the end of 2017, landfilling material started to be more economical (despite diversion or other environmental goals) than covering the handling and shipping costs of getting material to market.”

It’s not clear what happened to the 300 million pounds of film that were sold for recycling in 2016 but not in 2017. Because the ACC doesn’t report the total amount of plastic film collected, what proportion of the collected film that represents is also obscure. Nor is it clear why the ACC has not yet reported the 2018 numbers. But even within the 1 billion pounds of plastic film the ACC categorized as “recycled,” much is likely either burned or landfilled. According to the report, 378 million pounds of the film were exported, and the ACC said in an emailed statement to The Intercept that it doesn’t know what happened to the waste after that point.

Although the ACC doesn’t put an exact number on the total amount of bags that were burned or landfilled, a recent call to action from a group of plastics recyclers called Recycle More Bags does. The document, which came out in May and called for legislation that would require that new plastic bags contain recycled material, noted that “600 million pounds of plastic bags collected for recycling in North America in 2018 was landfilled or incinerated due to lack of end-markets.” A later version of the document changed the figure to “hundreds of millions of pounds.”

“Based on the two industry reports, it looks like we may have incinerated and disposed of the same amount of plastic film and bags that were reprocessed,” said Dell.

Recycling or Burning?

One of the latest solutions industry is offering to the plastics crisis isn’t recycling exactly. While many questions remain about what exactly the Hefty EnergyBag program is, it is making it clear how expensive and difficult it is to find a use for plastic waste.

In April, 49 years after protesters kicked off the first Earth Day by dumping single-use waste at Coca-Cola’s doorstep, Dow Chemical was a “forest green sponsor” of Omaha’s Earth Day event, despite the fact that it is the largest plastics manufacturer in the world. With a $5,000 gift, Dow’s Hefty EnergyBag program, a joint effort of Dow and Reynolds Consumer Products, was one of the two biggest donors for the event. Held in Omaha’s lush Elmwood Park, the day’s festivities were as green and wholesome as any corporate sponsor could want. Native American folk music played as locals strolled the grass from table to table learning about urban beekeeping, rain barrels, microchickens, and tree planting. Children stroked a soft gray rabbit. And dozens of environmentally concerned Nebraskans participated in an outdoor yoga class, bending and stretching in the sun along with their neighbors.

Dow and Hefty first rolled out the program on Earth Day 2016 as a way for Omaha residents to dispose of plastic forks and knives, chip bags, and other single-use plastics that the city hadn’t been able to process. They just had to put the plastic trash into special orange Hefty bags, put them out on the curb, and the city would pick up and recycle the trash. “They were very definitely calling it recycling,” recalls Richard Yoder, a local sustainability consultant. But Yoder and other Omahanians soon learned that rather than being melted down into reusable plastic, the contents of their bags were being burned in an incinerator in Missouri that had a history of Clean Air Act violations.

Last year, after Yoder argued at a local debate over the program that calling the Energybag program recycling was misleading, Hefty stopped using that term. Yet, in labored language, the company’s website still pitches the program as an environmental good, or “a groundbreaking initiative that collects hard to recycle plastics.” The Hefty EnergyBag program “complements existing recycling programs,” according to Ashley Mendoza, a spokesperson for Dow. “Our long-term vision is to keep more plastics out of landfills by collecting them for recycling or recovery if they cannot be reused.”

After the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives called out the Omaha program for creating more pollution, the Dow and Hefty initiative also stopped sending the orange bags to the incinerator. Since then, the plastic waste has been put to several purposes, including being compressed into fence posts and railroad ties and going “to a Canadian firm that made some sort of decking,” according to Dale Gubbels, CEO of FirstStar Recycling, the Omaha company partnering with Dow and Hefty on the project.

While Dow and Hefty promote the program as a way to convert plastic into “valuable energy sources,” it isn’t cheap, according to Gubbels. The expense has apparently disappointed some initial proponents, who expected the program to pay for itself. “I have to try to convince them if you want to recycle, you have to recognize that you’ve got to pay for it,” he said. All in all, he added, the program, which was pitched as an energy-efficient solution to plastic waste, has proven “far more challenging than anyone had envisioned when this thing got started.” According to an email from Mendoza, “The price of the Hefty® EnergyBag® orange bags cover the cost of running the program.”

Scientists point out another hitch in the energy bag plan: Because no one has learned how to remove additives from plastic, products made from recycled waste, such as the railroad ties, fence posts, and decks made from Omaha’s plastic, can release toxic chemicals as they degrade. “Until we do a better job of eliminating the hazards in its first use, you’re going to have problems managing the toxicity in every subsequent use,” said Pete Myers, a biologist and the founder and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences. “Some of the types of plastics that they’re proposing to recycle contain chemicals connected to a 50-year decline in sperm count, to type 2 diabetes, and to breast and prostate cancer. These are serious problems and we don’t know enough about the exposures to make it safe for the child sitting on that deck.”

When asked about this possibility, Gubbels said he hadn’t considered it and didn’t have expertise in toxic chemicals. In any case, Gubbels has been spreading Omaha’s plastic waste around. He sent one recent load to Renewlogy, a plant in Salt Lake City, Utah, that heats the plastic and extracts energy from it, and said he plans to send a load to a similar plastic-to-energy facility in Texas called New Hope Energy.

The Myth of “Chemical Recycling”

Renewlogy and New Hope are two firms offering what the plastics industry is putting forward as the newest solution to plastic waste: so-called chemical recycling. According to the American Chemistry Council, expanding plastics recovery into this realm could “result in billions of dollars of economic output.” Yet even the technology’s biggest proponents acknowledge that no one yet knows how to efficiently and economically convert plastic into its component parts and then back into fuel. If all the non-recycled plastics in the U.S. were converted to oil, “we could create enough fuel to power 9 million cars each year,” the Chevron Phillips sustainability director, Rick Wagner, argued in a recent article in Plastics Recycling Update magazine. That transformation would also allow Chevron, the second-largest plastic manufacturer in the world, to shrug off its responsibility for the massive quantities of pollution now choking the globe. But even Wagner admits that we’re still far from knowing how to chemically recycle. It’s sort of like going to Mars, Wagner wrote. “We’re not quite there yet. Not tomorrow, but someday. Hopefully soon.” Mendoza described pyrolysis, the method used by the Renewlogy plant to which Hefty EnergyBag waste has already been sent, as “a potential next step toward advanced recycling.”

The idea that plastic can be broken down into its elements, which can then be turned into fuel, waxes, and lubricants has been around for decades. But such waste-to-fuel plants have never proven economically or environmentally viable. According to a 2017 report of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, most of the waste-to-fuel projects in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, which used either pyrolysis or a related technology called gasification, were closed or canceled before even getting off the ground. Among the impediments cited in the report were the inability to meet energy efficiency and pollution control goals. “In general, costs are higher and more uncertain than project proponents foresee and revenues are lower and more uncertain,” the report noted.

The environmental and financial viability of the latest energy-to-fuel plants is also unclear. When asked about the efficiency of the facilities used by the Hefty EnergyBag program, Mendoza wrote in an email that “material efficiency of a pyrolysis processing unit is dependent on the technology used and the types of materials fed into the facility.” Mendoza also wrote that “Dow has a vital interest and responsibility in making plastic materials beneficial throughout their lifecycle. We are working to improve the entire system where our products are used in order to maximize resource efficiency and the benefits derived from using our products.”

Neither New Hope or Renewlogy, two of the nine companies in the American Chemistry Council’s industry alliance for chemical recycling, would reveal what volume of plastics their plants require to produce fuel. Renewlogy did not respond to numerous emailed interview requests. But the company’s website says that between Omaha’s waste and that collected through a similar Hefty EnergyBag program in the city of Boise, a million pounds of plastic were “diverted” in 2018. A video on the site also describes Renewlogy’s process as cost-effective and “proven clean.” The New Hope plant in Texas issued a press release announcing that it will have a capacity to process 150 tons of plastic a day, but the company declined to comment on that facility’s efficiency. “It’s a brand-new industry and there are some things we can’t communicate about,” said Lee Royal, who answered the phone there. “How we do business is probably not something we’d like to share just now.”

In an emailed statement, the American Chemistry Council defended the value of chemical recycling, noting that “these technologies can produce a wide range of products beyond fuel, including higher value chemicals and other feedstocks” and that such products “have much greater value in the marketplace than in a landfill.”

The big open questions about the efficiency, safety, and economic viability of the chemical recycling process — and the admissions from its proponents that they haven’t figured out how to make it work — haven’t stopped the chemical industry from passing laws facilitating funding of the scheme. Texas recently became the sixth state to pass legislation (supported by Chevron Phillips Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and the American Chemistry Council) that would pave the way for new chemical recycling facilities.

Some of these laws have been designed to ensure that the facilities will be subject to minimal regulation. By categorizing them as manufacturing plants rather than solid waste disposal sites, chemical recycling operations may be exempted from limits on nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, heavy metals, and greenhouse gases that are imposed on solid waste sites.

Nevertheless, chemical recycling facilities are already being promoted — and, in some cases, funded — as sustainable fixes for the plastics problem. In Oregon, a waste management company is pushing to get its plastic-burning plant classified as renewable energy. And in Ashley, Indiana, a new chemical recycling plant is being financed with $85 million in green bonds from the state, funds that are earmarked for environmentally beneficial projects. Brightmark Energy, the company behind it, says its missionis to “rise up and meet the needs of our planet.”

Some have objected to the use of taxpayer money to back a process that has repeatedly failed financially when it’s been tried in the past. “Every one of these pyrolysis facilities has depended upon government largesse to even try to get off the ground,” said Andrew Dobbs, campaign director at Texas Campaign for the Environment, a group that opposed the Texas bill. “So-called chemical recycling doesn’t make economic sense. It’s a highly expensive and energy-intensive process that’s competing with burying things in a hole in the ground. On the other end, they’re producing fuel, which is competing with natural gas when natural gas is dirt cheap. The only way they’re going to make that work is for the costs to be paid by someone else.”

According to the email from the American Chemistry Council, chemical recycling “facilities are being developed by venture capital and investment firms, which is a vote of confidence in the financial promise of these technologies and business models.” The email also noted that “Chemical recycling technologies are developing very quickly and — like other technologies including wind and solar — will become more efficient as they reach commercial scale.”

Whether it can meet its goal of turning 288 tons of plastic per day into 778 barrels of diesel blend stocks, 418 barrels of naphtha blend stocks, and 360 barrels of industrial wax, this latest take on plastic recycling will, like all chemical recycling plants, use fossil fuels to convert fossil fuel products into additional fossil fuels. They will also almost surely ease the way for the continued production of even more plastic.

“This is all just a huge, incredibly expensive distraction,” said Denise Patel, U.S. program director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. While China’s decision to stop taking U.S. plastic finally revealed the country’s plastics problem, the idea of chemical recycling — fanciful as it may be — could undermine public urgency about it, according to Patel. “China’s decision is an opportunity for cities to examine waste and double down on reducing,” she said. “Instead, these projects are exacerbating the problem by giving people the idea that there is a solution and it’s OK to keep buying them.”

At the industry conference in Texas, no one asked whether it was OK to keep producing more plastic. After the pictures of injured sea creatures were gone and an accountant spoke to the executives about how to best take advantage of Trump’s cuts to the top tax brackets, attendees learned about the bright prospects for their industry. Exports of the world’s most popular plastic, polyethylene, will not just continue, but will likely experience “healthy growth” over the next several years, as a presentation from the investment research firm IHS Markit explained. Nor was there much question where all that new plastic will be sold. An increasing share is expected to go to Asian countries other than China, since the growing awareness of plastics pollution in Europe and North America may slightly weaken markets there. The only real question about the proliferation of a product we know to be heating the planet, amassing all around and within us, and poisoning water and air around the world, is what new techniques its producers will adopt to make it seem fine.

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The Environmental Protection Agency is moving forward with a plan to sharply reduce and ultimately phase out experimental testing on lab animals. In an undated internal memo sent in late June to assistant administrators, EPA chief Andrew Wheeler explained that the agency will cut its funding for experiments on mammals in half by 2025. The memo, which was reviewed by The Intercept, also said that the EPA plans to stop using mammal studies for the approval of new chemicals by 2035 and that it will aim to eliminate all mammal studies. Under the new plan, any animal study done after that point will require approval by the EPA administrator.

The EPA is promoting alternative methods to gauge the threats posed by chemicals, such as computer modeling and tests on cells, which have been increasingly used in recent years. Yet no legal limits have ever been set using these alternative methods alone. Without the tests on rats, mice, and rabbits currently used to gauge the toxicity of chemicals and set safe levels, public health and environmental advocates worry that the policy shift will leave EPA unable to limit chemicals at all. “It effectively will mean you can’t regulate,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The internal announcement that EPA would speed the move away from animal testing coincided with the creation of a new section on the agency’s website that was published last week. Titled “Alternative Test Methods and Strategies to Reduce Vertebrate Animal Testing,” the newly released material details the EPA’s efforts to “reduce and replace testing on vertebrates.” On March 14, Wheeler signaled that he would be making the shift in a speech, broadcast internally to EPA staff, in which he described the animal testing issue as “important to me personally.”

The chemical industry also appears to care deeply about the reduction of animal research, according to emails of EPA staff released in June in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The American Chemistry Council, the largest American trade group representing chemical manufacturers, has long supported reducing regulators’ reliance on animal research, which is time-consuming and expensive — in addition to being key to understanding the harms chemicals pose to people.

The End of Chemical Regulation

A new generation of tests using cultured cells and computer simulation has expanded the ability to understand the risk compounds pose without using animals. Because it is not possible to perform animal tests for every one of the huge and growing number of man-made chemicals, these techniques, which can be done more quickly and cheaply, have become increasingly important.

But many scientists who study chemicals caution that research on cells or tiny invertebrate creatures, known as “in vitro toxicology,” cannot completely replace mammal experiments yet. “If you take the engine out of a car and study one piston at a time, it may not tell you what the car is going to do when you assemble it,” said Thomas Zoeller, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies the health effects of man-made chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls.

Zoeller’s own research revealed that, within mice, it’s not the actual PCB that causes harm but another chemical that the body creates by processing the original compound — a discovery that wouldn’t have been possible without exposing live mice to the chemical. “The parent compound gets into the animal and is metabolized in some tissues, including the brain. The body essentially bioactivates the parent compound,” Zoeller explained.

“If you exclusively depend on in vitro toxicology or mathematical modeling, you’re going to miss all the different interactions that happen in a physiological system — whether in rat, mouse, human, or a fetus. You simply cannot replicate that,” said Zoeller. “EPA is well aware that these cells don’t replicate human metabolism. So when it comes to bioactivation, they’re going to miss all that — and they know that.”

And that, some scientists fear, is exactly the reason the EPA is moving toward eliminating tests on animals. “If you require that, to regulate, you need to show an adverse affect for a chemical, and you can’t see an adverse affect in cells, then it’s to your benefit to only do testing in cells,” said Laura Vandenberg, a professor at UMass Amherst’s School of Public Health, who studies how exposures to chemicals during the development affects health later in life. “Laws, policy, and regulations require animal evidence.”

While regulatory rules can be updated to reflect new methods, it’s not clear how non-animal experiments would ever lead to restrictions. With animal tests, the presence of a clear endpoint such as cancer or birth defects helps regulators calculate safe levels for humans. But a positive finding in a non-animal test will likely only lead to more research, according to NRDC’s Sass.

“Let’s say they do find a hazard in a chemical. Let’s say it triggers changes associated with cancer. They don’t then call it a carcinogen. They just prioritize it for further testing,” said Sass, who has a PhD in anatomy and cell biology. “Then they test it on higher level tests, then on higher level tests. So if it is something that’s toxic, we’ll still go through years and years of testing and arguing and fighting.”

Now People Are the Guinea Pigs

In 2006, the EPA’s National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory published a study showing that pregnant mice given the industrial chemical PFOA developed enlarged livers and had a greater chance of losing their pregnancies. The pups of the exposed mice weighed less and were developmentally delayed compared to the non-exposed pups, and the male pups had abnormal sexual development. While the EPA has yet to set a legal limit for PFOA, the agency used the mouse study to set a health advisory level for the chemical in 2009. And some states have used it to calculate their own regulations.

But since NHEERL did that groundbreaking work, the number of scientists leading animal research there has shrunken by more than half. The lab employed 56 principal investigators who conducted 139 active protocols involving animals in 2008, according to the EPA press office. This year, only 24 principal investigators were left, conducting 52 experiments involving lab animals. At another EPA lab focused on animal toxicology, the National Exposure Research Laboratory, the number of active protocols involving animals has dropped from 20 in 2008 to 13 in 2019. And neither lab will continue to exist after a planned reorganization of the Office of Research and Development is complete. Indeed, under the new structure, no labs that focus exclusively on animal research will remain. In his memo, Wheeler noted that 200,000 lab animals have already been spared from testing in recent years.

As Wheeler has embraced the adoption of new testing methods, the EPA has teamed up with animal rights groups such as PETA that oppose animal research because they see it as cruel. In April, the EPA co-sponsored a webinar on alternate methods of chemical assessment with PETA International Science Consortium and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine; the latter group is closely affiliated with the animal rights organization.

But it seems unlikely that the real issue for Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist reported to have invested in a burger restaurant, is animal welfare. Internal EPA communications point to the chemical industry’s interest in the alliance with animal rights groups. In a July 2017 email to representatives of Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, Syngenta AG, the American Chemistry Council, PETA International, and the EPA, Michael Dourson — Trump’s failed nominee to lead the EPA’s chemical safety division  — proposed an Institute of Predictive Safety Assessment that would bring PETA together with the industry to help shift the thinking on testing, as E&E News reported that year.

The recently released batch of emails included one sent three months later to Nancy Beck, who then ran the EPA’s toxics office, and Dourson from Daland Juberg, who identified himself as heading human health science for DowDuPont. In it, Juberg inquired about the institute’s progress. “Let’s talk down the road on areas where EPA might have interest in moving the needle,” Juberg wrote.

While animal rights activists have focused on the ethics of exposing innocent creatures to toxic substances, by allowing chemicals onto the market without first testing their safety, people have essentially become the guinea pigs. Residents of Wilmington, North Carolina, may feel that particularly acutely. After the chemical GenX was discovered in the Cape Fear River downstream from a factory owned first by DuPont and now its spinoff, Chemours, researchers tested the blood of people who have been drinking the water and found four PFAS chemicals that had never been publicly identified, let alone studied.

“Do they have health effects? Which of the chemicals we found in their blood are related to high cholesterol? Which cause elevated liver enzymes?” asked Jane Hoppin, deputy director of the Center for Human Health and the Environment at North Carolina State University, which is conducting the blood study. “These poor people have been drinking these chemicals for 40 years, and we have nothing to offer them.”

With mysterious chemicals posing unknown harms within their own bodies, the people of Wilmington deserve more than cursory research, said Hoppin. “You can do a lot of quick testing in a petri dish,” she said. “But to see what really happens, you need a mammal.”

“Looking Forward to Collaborations!”

Beck, who directed regulatory science policy for the American Chemistry Council before Trump appointed her to run EPA’s toxics office in 2017, exchanged emails about the use of alternative techniques to replace animal testing with several chemical company representatives, including Dennis Deziel, director of federal government affairs for Dow Chemical.

“Dow is a leader in non-animal testing methods,” Deziel wrote to Beck in July 2017. “We want to engage on this issue in as helpful way as possible.” Beck met with Deziel and other Dow staff a few weeks later, according to the emails. “Extremely helpful for us,” Deziel wrote to Beck afterward.

Also at the meeting was Louis Scarano, an EPA toxicologist, who held at least one other meeting at which the issue was discussed with Deziel’s colleague, Sue Marty, Dow Chemical’s toxicology science director.

“I really appreciate your time and I enjoyed our conversation,” Marty wrote in an email to Scarano after that meeting, which was in mid-August 2017. “I think we share similar views on how alternate approaches could be used in the TSCA program,” she wrote, in a reference to the Toxic Substances Control Act, the primary federal law governing chemical regulation.

“Looking forward to collaborations!” the EPA’s Scarano responded. Scarano is now listed as the contact person for people seeking information on how the agency plans to reduce animal testing in TSCA as well as under other laws that involve chemical regulation.

Dow, it should be noted, is the maker of many chemicals that fall under the EPA’s purview and have been subject to animal testing, including chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to neurodevelopmental problems that the EPA found dangerous enough to ban in 2016; 1,3-butadiene, a chemical that a division of the EPA recently found — using animal testing — to cause cancer as well as reproductive and developmental problems; and ethylene oxide, another compound the EPA recently assessed. The EPA set the safety threshold for that chemical, which has caused elevated cancer risks in more than 50 places around the U.S., using studies showing ethylene oxide caused tumors of the brain, lung, connective tissue, uterus, and mammary glands of mice and rats.

Even before the recent industry push and policy shift at EPA, the federal regulation of chemicals had slowed to a near standstill. Only a small handful of the more than 40,000 chemicals now in use have been regulated. An overhaul of the 40-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act law in 2016 was supposed to finally fix that. The updated law gave the agency new authority to require testing. Since the Trump administration took office, however, the agency appears not to have taken advantage of its new powers.

“In the nearly 3 years since passage of TSCA reform, EPA has not once used these new authorities and seems to be avoiding them at all costs,” Democratic Senators Cory Booker, Tom Udall, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, and Sheldon Whitehouse wrote to EPA administrator Wheeler on June 20.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has advanced another provision of the updated law: language that requires the EPA to rely on non-animal tests when they’re as good as or better than the animal research. The EPA’s materials detailing its shift away from animal testing repeatedly cite the directive. But as the senators pointed out in their letter, “The law’s vertebrate animal testing provisions in no way limit EPA’s testing authorities; they simply call for EPA to rely on methods not involving vertebrate animals where such methods can provide equivalent or better scientific quality and relevance than vertebrate tests.”

Nor does TSCA, only one of the laws under which EPA is authorized to conduct animal tests, explain why the new directive will affect research throughout the agency, including in its water and pesticide divisions. Nevertheless, according to Wheeler’s memo, work to finalize the shift away from animal testing will begin immediately.

The post EPA Move to Phase Out Animal Experiments Could Mean the End of Toxics Regulations appeared first on Type Investigations.

New data suggests that the safety threshold for PFOA in drinking water should be as low as .1 parts per trillion, according to the nation’s top toxicologist. Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, cited the figure, which is 700 times lower than the safety level set by the Environmental Protection Agency, at a conference on PFAS at Northeastern University last week.

While PFOA has already been tied to kidney and testicular cancer, among other diseases, recent research linking PFOA exposure to pancreatic cancer is the basis for the lower number cited by Birnbaum. The research was done by the National Toxicology Program, which is a division of the NIEHS.

“If you look at the data, pancreatic tumors are present at very, very low concentrations from PFOA,” Birnbaum told the audience at the conference. “If you use the pancreatic tumors in the rats in the NTP study to calculate what would really be a virtually safe dose, you’re getting down at about .1 ppt. Well, that’s really low. And that’s only for one PFAS.” Birnbaum suggested that regulators might ultimately issue one drinking water standard for the entire class, which contains thousands of compounds.

About the EPA’s current water standard, Birnbaum said, “Many of us would think that is not health protective.”

According to a summary of the experiment, male rats exposed to PFOA developed both cancerous and noncancerous tumors of the pancreas. At the lowest of three doses given in the experiment, 20 out of 50 rats developed the tumors. At the higher doses, more than half of the exposed rats developed the tumors.

The summary also shows that PFOA increased the numbers of cancerous and noncancerous liver tumors in the two-year rat study. At the conference, Birnbaum mentioned that the recent experiments also showed that PFAS exposure affected breast development. “There were clearly impacts on the growth of the mammary gland and problems with lactation,” she said.

Both the NIEHS, which conducts scientific research on the effects of the environment on health, and the EPA, which is responsible for environmental regulation, have said they are prioritizing PFAS, industrial compounds used in firefighting foam, nonstick coatings, and other products that persist indefinitely in the environment and accumulate in people. But the new information about their health effects has been emerging very slowly.

The Japan National Institute of Health Sciences first asked the NTP to study the perfluorinated compounds in 1990, noting that in rats the chemicals induced the presence of a biomarker of DNA damage thought to be related to cancer. In 2003, the EPA also nominated the compounds for further study, citing their “presumed widespread human exposure” and the known toxicity of certain compounds in the class.

The rats in this two-year study were given their first dose of PFOA almost 10 years ago, in July 2009. And the NTP released a statistical analysis of the tumor study in June 2018. Yet more than a year later, the NIEHS has not published reports of the studies, which regulators typically need to fully understand the science when setting safety levels.

Asked in March about the delay in releasing the reports, Robin Arnette, of the NIEHS’s office of communications and public liaison, wrote in an email to The Intercept that “NTP routinely releases data tables for completed studies while formal reports are in preparation” and that reports that go along with the toxicology research on PFAS “are currently undergoing external peer review. We anticipate their publication on the NTP website later in 2019.”

A technical report based on the research “is in preparation and external peer review will take place later in 2019; the date is not yet set,” according to Arnette’s email, which also said, “Timelines and prioritization are dynamic. We are actively managing our usual processes to enable efficient delivery of information for those agents of growing public concern.”

Although the reports have yet to be released, some state regulators are already considering the NTP data as they set safety thresholds for PFAS. The Minnesota Department of Health cited the NTP tables in its April health-based guideline for PFHxS. And in March, California regulators set interim safety levels of 14 and 13 ppt for PFOA and PFOS, while citing “new cancer data recently released by the National Toxicology Program” and noting that safety levels “and the health effects on which they are based may change.”

The amount of these chemicals deemed safe to ingest in drinking water has been dropping quickly over the past several years, as is often the case as scientists learn more about how chemicals affect health. Between 2009 and 2016, the EPA’s official safety threshold for PFOA was 400 ppt. In 2016, the agency lowered the number to 70 ppt. Several states have since calculated lower limits. Vermont set drinking water health advisory limits of 20 ppt for PFOA. And, in April, New Jersey proposed drinking water standards of 14 ppt for PFOA and 13 ppt for the closely related chemical PFOS.

The post Teflon Toxin Safety Level Should be 700 Times Lower Than Current EPA Guideline appeared first on Type Investigations.

Last week, we learned that the Food and Drug Administration had detected PFAS compounds in pineapple, sweet potato, meat, and chocolate cake. The presence of the industrial compounds in our food was made public by the Environmental Working Group after a staff member of the Environmental Defense Fund took photos of the research at a scientific conference in Europe.

While the FDA fields questions about why it didn’t present this information to the public itself (the agency released the data along with a statement on Tuesday), it has become clear that 3M, the company that originally developed PFOS and PFOA, had known for a very long time that these toxic and persistent chemicals were in our food.

According to a 2001 study sponsored by 3M, 12 samples of food from around the country — including ground beef, bread, apples, and green beans — tested positive for either PFOA or PFOS. One piece of bread had 14,700 parts per trillion of PFOA, though the report noted that the sample was considered “suspect.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has known about the study for years, but it is not clear if the FDA was aware of the research. The Environmental Working Group mentioned the 3M study in a 2002 report on PFAS chemicals and alerted the Centers for Disease Control.

On Tuesday, attorney Rob Bilott wrote to the FDA to ask “the extent to which FDA was aware of the data collected on behalf of the 3M company in 2001 that confirmed elevated levels of PFAS in the U.S. food supply.” In 1999, Bilott sued DuPont over PFOA contamination around its plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where the company used the chemical to make Teflon. Through his litigation, he acquired many documents about PFAS, which he has since supplied to the EPA, FDA, and other federal agencies.

The EPA did not respond to questions about when exactly it became aware of the 3M study. 3M did not respond to a request for comment.

Tuesday’s FDA statement noted that recent tests “did not detect PFAS in the vast majority of the foods tested.” The statement also said that “based on the best available current science, the FDA does not have any indication that these substances are a human health concern, in other words a food safety risk in human food, at the levels found in this limited sampling.”

Yet there is abundant evidence that even at very low levels, both chemicals interfere with human immunity, reproduction, and development, and cause multiple health problems, including elevated cholesterol, thyroid disease, and cancer. Virtually everyone has some PFAS chemicals in their blood. They enter the body through food, water, dust, and exposure to consumer products.

The post 3M Knew About PFAS Food Contamination in 2001 appeared first on Type Investigations.

All sewage sludge recently tested by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection was contaminated with PFAS chemicals, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. The state tested the sludge, solid waste that remains after the treatment of domestic and industrial water, for the presence of three “forever chemicals”: PFOA, PFOS, and PFBS. Of 44 samples taken from Maine farms and other facilities that distribute compost made from the sludge, all contained at least one of the PFAS chemicals. In all but two of the samples, the chemicals exceeded safety thresholds for sludge that Maine set early last year.

In March, the state announced that it would temporarily halt the land application of sludge and begin the testing, after milk from a dairy farm in Arundel, Maine, was found to be contaminated with PFAS that had likely come from sludge that the farmers had spread on their land as fertilizer. These results, which have not yet been published or reported, are from the first round of testing. An additional 28 samples were collected but the results of their testing are not yet available.

While Maine is leading the nation by setting limits for the chemicals and testing sludge to see if it meets them, local environmentalists fear that the state’s levels — 2.5 parts per billion for PFOA, 5.2 ppb for PFOS, and 1,900 ppb for PFBS — may not be stringent enough. “They’re probably about 10 times weaker than they should be,” said Mike Belliveau, executive director of the Environmental Health Strategy Center in Portland. “Even low parts-per-billion levels of PFAS in sludge can threaten the health of the food supply.”

The post Toxic PFAS Chemicals Found in Maine Farms Fertilized with Sewage Sludge appeared first on Type Investigations.

This story originally appeared in The Intercept.

Wendy Abrams has used her wealth to help protect the environment and public health. She’s the founder of a public art exhibit meant to raise awareness on climate change, and she serves on the boards of NRDC Action Fund and the Waterkeeper Alliance, and has been on the Environmental Defense Fund’s National Council. She helped found the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago, which trains students to address environmental injustices. Abrams was a major donor to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Rahm Emanuel, and she has railed against the Keystone Pipeline and air-polluting coal plants.

Abrams’s wealth comes from Medline, a company her great-grandfather founded in 1910. Today Medline is the largest privately held manufacturer and supplier of medical supplies in the United States, with over $10 billion in sales in 2018. Abrams is a principal shareholder in Medline and formerly served as the company’s director of corporate communications; her brothers and husband are now, respectively, Medline’s CEO, president, and chief operating officer.

But now, in an uncomfortable turn of events, Abrams finds herself on the other side of an environmental crisis — affiliated with the polluter, rather than fighting on behalf of the polluted.

The Clear Killer

In 2016, a division of the Environmental Protection Agency found that the air pollutant ethylene oxide, or EtO, was more dangerous than previously thought. The clear gas was already known to cause tumors of the brain, lung, breast, uterus, and lymph system as well as neurological effects, respiratory effects, and numbness of the extremities. But the report changed EtO’s classification from probable human carcinogen to officially “carcinogenic to humans” and found that cancer risk from EtO exposure was 30 times worse than previous estimates.

Because the EPA has yet to set limits on the chemical that reflect this latest science, more than 100 census tracts around the country have elevated cancer risks due in part to ethylene oxide pollution. A 2018 EPA report, which was based on industrial facilities’ tally of their own emissions, clearly tied specific sites emitting the chemical to the cancer risk in each place. And in Waukegan, Illinois, a small city about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee, the biggest source of ethylene oxide pollution is a Medline plant owned and operated by Wendy Abrams’s family.

Diana Burdette and her husband moved to Waukegan from Chicago in 2010. The former industrial hub on the shores of Lake Michigan offered affordable housing and proximity to the college and graduate schools they were attending. Even while both were in school, Burdette and her husband were able to rent a charming two-bedroom, brick duplex near a wooded area. Though they didn’t know it at the time, the home where they would live for nine years and have two children was being inundated with ethylene oxide from Medline, which was just one mile away, and from another factory three miles away run by a company called Vantage Specialty Chemicals.

Not long after moving to Waukegan, both Burdette and her husband began to develop respiratory problems. Burdette also began to have difficulty digesting food and lost 80 pounds. She also began to get a tingly numbness in her face and fingertips that would come and go but stayed during most of her winters there. Both her children, now three and five, also had breathing difficulties. When they got colds, the entire family relied on nebulizers. And her older son developed severe eczema.

“They kept saying it would clear up, but it never did,” said Burdette. “Until we moved.”

Shortly after the family moved to another home several miles further from the Medline plant last October, her son’s rash finally went away. Burdette’s digestion problems also disappeared, and the numbness in her face and fingertips went away, as did her entire family’s respiratory problems.

The next month, Burdette learned from an article in the Chicago Tribune that the Medline plant had been emitting dangerous amounts of ethylene oxide — the same air pollutant that was also plaguing a community about an hour south in Willowbrook, Illinois. In 2017, the Medline facility released 2,863 pounds of the chemical into the air and the Vantage Specialty Chemicals in nearby Gurnee plant released 2,160 pounds of the chemical, according to reports the companies filed with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. Together, the emissions caused the census tract where Burdette and her family lived to have a cancer risk of 157 per million in 2014, according to the most recent EPA air toxics report. That’s about 5 times the national average.

Like the residents of Willowbrook, who formed a community group called Stop Sterigenics to fight the pollution emitted from the nearby Sterigenics plant, people living close to the Medline and Vantage plants, both of which are in Lake County, sprang into action. Burdette began working with Clean Power Lake County, an organization that was already focusing on some of Waukegan’s other serious environmental problems, including a local coal-fired power plant, a coal ash pond, several Superfund sites, and a number of chemical facilities (one of which was the site of a deadly explosion this past weekend). Other residents created a new group, Stop EtO Lake County.

But the environmental activists in the two suburban areas of Chicago have met with different responses. In Willowbrook, where the census tract most affected by ethylene oxide is 77 percent white and has an average per capita income of more than $71,000 a year, the EPA sent high-level officials last August to explain the risk locals faced from the chemical as soon as the federal report identifying it was made public. On the same day, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR, also released a report the EPA had requested about ethylene oxide in Willowbrook. In November, the EPA began monitoring the air there. And by February, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency closed the plant. The governor sent out a tweet celebrating the closure and committing to protect “the health and well-being of every Illinoisan.”

But in Waukegan, where the census tract most affected by the chemical is only 25 percent white and has a per capita income of just over $14,000, the same dangerous chemical is still in the air. Although the EPA and the state have known about the ethylene oxide in Lake County and other hotspots around the country since at least August, Burdette and the others residents learned of its presence in their air from the newspaper six months after Willowbrook residents were briefed about it. No high-level officials came to Waukegan or Gurnee to address the local risk.

And while Sterigenics was stopped from releasing ethylene oxide in Willowbrook, the Medline plant in Waukegan and the Vantage facility in Gurnee continue to emit the chemical. So far, the EPA has not done any air monitoring for ethylene oxide near either plant. Meanwhile, the federal agency has continued collecting air samples in Willowbrook even after that plant closed in February.

Lake County’s health department recently announced that it will hire a company to begin monitoring for ethylene oxide near both plants in June. While they welcome the move, local environmental groups have pointed out that the decision leaves their already strapped local governments to shoulder an expense that the federal government has paid for elsewhere. The county and the Illinois Congressional delegation have also requestedthat the ATSDR do an assessment of the health risk presented by ethylene oxide in Lake County, as it did in Willowbrook.

Asked about the discrepancy in its treatment of the two cases of pollution, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency provided a written response that noted that since the release by U.S. EPA of the monitoring data for Willowbrook, “the Illinois EPA has been evaluating other sources of emissions including those in Lake County.” The statement also said that the state agency has been working with both the Medline and Vantage facilities on measures to reduce emissions and that, in the coming weeks, “Illinois EPA will invite the public to participate in a meeting to discuss these noted and other measures at the source. Vantage will also begin air monitoring in the Gurnee community this quarter. Also in the coming weeks, the Illinois EPA will invite the public to participate in a meeting to discuss a draft construction permit that will detail emissions reducing measures that Medline will undertake very soon.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also provided a written statement in response to questions for this story. While the federal environmental agency acknowledged that it was not conducting air monitoring in Lake County, it said that, along with the IEPA, it is “coordinating with the facilities in Lake County, Illinois, to achieve additional emission reductions. The Agencies are also using a variety of tools, such as air dispersion modeling, to better characterize potential risks near the Lake County facilities, as well as other facilities and areas that NATA, which is EPA’s screening tool, identified as potentially having elevated risks.” The U.S. EPA is also providing technical assistance to the Lake County Health Department on the monitoring it is planning to do, according to the statement.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Vantage said that the company has installed an additional scrubber to reduce emissions and is currently doing testing to verify that it’s functioning properly. Vantage then plans to conduct ambient air monitoring.

The lag in the federal and state response to their problem has left some Lake County residents feeling like second-class citizens. “We want what Willowbrook got,” Jolanta Pomiotlo, a Gurnee resident of 18 years and founding member of Stop EtO in Lake County, told me recently. “We’re being told by our government agencies that all of the resources are being dedicated to Sterigenics, and they can’t afford to pay for testing in Lake County. Apparently only wealthy communities are entitled to resources from the state.”

Members of Clean Power Lake County have also been calling attention to the racial inequity in the state. “They take care of the white communities,” said Burdette, a first generation Guatemalan American. “But what about our black and brown communities? What about us?”

The post Air Pollution Crisis Exposes More Environmental Racism in Illinois appeared first on Type Investigations.

This story originally appeared in The Intercept.

Decades after Dupont and 3M first discovered that the perfluorinated chemicals making them fortunes could be transmitted from mothers to babies, millions of women around the world are passing dangerous amounts of these toxic compounds to their children, according to a report published on Monday.

Women’s breast milk in many countries now contains chemicals belonging to a class of compounds known as PFAS at levels well above the safety thresholds set by governments, says the report from international environmental group IPEN. In Jordan, for instance, researchers found breast milk contained, on average, 144 parts per trillion of PFOA, according to a 2015 study. That’s more than double the 70 ppt health advisory level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set for that chemical in drinking water; more than seven times the 20 ppt drinking water safety level recently set by the state of Vermont; and more than 10 times the 14 ppt drinking water threshold the state of New Jersey proposed for PFOA earlier this month.

One woman’s milk contained 1,120 ppt of PFOA, according to the Jordanian study, which also found that 96 percent of cow’s milk samples also contained PFOS and PFOA. Dairy farmers in the U.S. have recently run into a similar contamination problem.

PFAS chemicals — used in nonstick pans, firefighting foam, and hundreds of other products — have also been found in breast milk in at least 19 countries in Europe, Asia, and North America, according to a study published in November in Environmental Science and Pollution Research. That article, which noted that scientists have yet to look for the chemicals in breast milk in Africa, Antartica, Australia, and South America, cited research documenting PFAS levels above 100 ppt in breast milk in Hungary, Spain, German, China, Malaysia, and Canada. The highest average level was found in the Ehime region of Japan, where human breast milk contained PFOS at an average level of 232 ppt in 2008.

In the United States, a 2004 study found nine PFAS chemicals in breast milk in Massachusetts, with PFOS being the highest at 131 ppt. But later studies suggest that levels of some of those chemicals may have dropped.

Early exposure to the chemicals can cause permanent harm. PFAS compounds reach fetuses through the placenta and are present at all stages of pregnancy, according to a study published last month. After birth, they can accumulate in breastfeeding babies. Prenatal exposure can affect immunity, the development of the nervous system, and hormonal function, according to a 2018 Japanese study. Other research has shown that the compounds can affect vaccine response, asthma, kidney function, obesity, and the age at which girls first get their periods.

DuPont, which started using PFOA to make Teflon in the 1940s, has known that women pass the chemical onto their newborns since at least 1981, when it was monitoring a small group of pregnant workers in one of its West Virginia factories and found measurable amounts of PFOA in their babies. At the time, both DuPont and 3M, which created PFOA and sold it to DuPont for decades, already knew from their own research that pregnant rats exposed to PFOA could pass the chemical onto their pups. And in 1993, 3M scientists confirmed in an unpublished study that mother goats also transmitted the chemicals to their young through their breast milk.

But for years, the companies didn’t tell the public or regulators about their discoveries — a move that has helped thwart regulation of the chemicals. After 3M and an attorney suing DuPont provided documents to the EPA, both companies were fined in 2006 for withholding evidence of harm, including their research on maternal transmission of PFAS. And in 2009, some 17 years after 3M finished its goat experiment, EPA scientists published their own study documenting the flow of PFOA from one generation to another through breast milk, this time in lab mice.

By then, the chemicals had spread far and wide. In recent years, PFAS have been found at high levels in waterproof clothing made in Bangladesh, soccer shoes made in Indonesia, and in rice and pork liver in Taiwan. Exposure has also been traced to municipal waste dumps, food wrapping, carpets, textiles, fish, and in Thailand, both tap and bottled water.

From any of these sources, the industrial chemicals now make their way into nursing mothers around the world and from there, into babies, many of whom now consume PFAS compounds as part of their very first meals.

The post High Levels of Toxic PFAS Chemicals Pollute Breast Milk Around the World appeared first on Type Investigations.

This story originally appeared in The Intercept.

While much of the world struggles to clean up contamination from the toxic industrial compound PFOS, Brazil is still adding to the massive environmental mess with its large-scale production, use, and export of sulfluramid, a pesticide that degrades into PFOS.

Linked to low birth weight, weakened immune response, liver effects, high cholesterol, thyroid dysfunction, cancer, and other health problems, PFOS is no longer made or used in most countries. The chemical, which was phased out in the U.S. by 2015, was originally developed by 3M and was a critical component of Scotchgard and firefighting foam. In the 182 countries that are party to the Stockholm Convention, an international treaty (unsigned by the U.S.) that governs persistent pollutants, the use of PFOS has been severely restricted since 2009.

But the Stockholm Convention carved out several loopholes for PFOS, including one for its use in killing leaf-cutting ants. Sulfluramid is made from PFOS and breaks down into that and several other chemicals within weeks. Brazil, the only country governed by the treaty that has permission to produce the pesticide, has been able to export it without notifying the convention because the treaty restricts PFOS, but makes no mention of sulfluramid, which is now used widely in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, and Venezuela, among other countries.

This week, delegates of the Stockholm Convention are meeting in Geneva to discuss whether to close loopholes in the PFOS ban. Environmentalists are pushing to name sulfluramid in the treaty, which would require Brazil to report its sales outside the country and to put a five-year limit on the loophole allowing its use to kill leaf-cutting ants.

Pesticide makers from Brazil are expected to push back. Abraisca, a trade association representing the main manufacturers of the pesticide in Brazil, insists that sulfluramid is necessary “to ensure the safety of people and the environment.” While green organizations point out that there are ways to kill leaf-cutting ants that don’t involve creating persistent toxic waste, the industry group has argued that there are no effective alternatives to sulfluramid. Abraisca did not respond to requests for comment.

In recent years, as PFOS has been phased out in most of the world, the Brazilian sulfluramid industry has blossomed. In 2008, the country made some 30 tons of the pesticide. By 2015, production had grown to between 40 and 60 tons in 2015, according to the most recent estimates.

While the Stockholm treaty language specifically allowed for the use of the chemical only to control two species of leaf-cutting ants, products containing sulfluramid such as Mirex-S, Atta Mex-S, and Dinagro-S are now widely available in stores and online for fighting all sorts of insects in Brazil, according to Zuleica Nycz, coordinator of chemical safety and environmental health for the Brazilian group Toxisphera.

Yet there is little consumer awareness regarding the hazards of this widely restricted compound. Many households may be sprinkling the chemical, which vegetables can absorb from the soil, in their home gardens without realizing its dangers, according to Joe DiGangi, a senior adviser to the international environmental group IPEN.

“Sulfluramid is Brazil’s dirty little secret,” said DiGangi, who will be attending the Geneva meeting.

Not surprisingly, as sulfluramid use has grown, there has been a parallel explosion of PFOS contamination in the country. Between 2004 and 2015, sulfluramid production there resulted in up to 487 metric tons of PFOS being released into the environment — a sizable portion of the chemical’s global contamination. Meanwhile, PFOS, which persists indefinitely in the environment, has increasingly turned up in soil, plants, coastal waters, and rivers in Brazil.

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